The ferocity of Dylan and The Hawks on The World tour is legendary. Fortunately the Manchester Concert has been released as Volume 4 of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg series under the title Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert. Reviewing this record, Rolling Stone Magazine described the performance as an evening of rancour and genius before suggesting that the newly released Blonde on Blonde might not have been “the best new Bob Dylan music you might have heard in that particular week”. High praise indeed. The tour ended with two nights at The Royal Albert Hall. These concerts saw the most walk outs, but Dylan also received vocal support, including from The Beatles. It took until 1974 for Bob Dylan to go on another major tour.

So how did Cat Power do on her one-off “recreation” of Bob Dylan’s “Judas” concert? In its review, published on November 07 2022, The Times’s describes the show as “electric” and the reviewer, Mark Beaumont, gives the show 4 stars out of 5. Beaumont notes that the initial acoustic set suited Marshall better, and that the electric part was less caustically confrontational than the original (as one would expect). Beaumont’s wittiest observation is that Dylan’s songs often benefit from being sung by “voices less resembling a knackered starter motor”. Personally I’m a fan of late period Dylan, especially Love & Theft, so Mr Beaumont and I might need to disagree on that.

Predictably, a wag called out “Judas” during the electric part of Cat Power’s Royal Albert Hall performance. You can see it in the video below: